Companies Are Ill-Prepared for IT Storage Changes

Virtually Non-Existent 36% of respondents are weak on storage virtualization.

IT departments appear ill-equipped to handle an anticipated migration to a virtualized or cloud environment for their big data storage needs, according to a recent survey from EMC. The resulting report, Managing Storage: Trends, Challenges and Options (2013-2014), takes a forward-spinning look at the expected movement away from traditional IT storage environments for many organizations. However, the vast majority of IT professionals acknowledge that this transition will serve as a major pain point, and that their overall staffing skill-set base isn't ready to make the switch. There's a serious gap of required knowledge among non-tech management as well. To address the latter, EMC is launching educational courses for management-level executives covering the cloud, IT as a Service (ITaaS) and big data. (You can find out more about the classes here.) Making a successful transformation is about more than technology, according to Tom Clancy, vice president of EMC's educational services. It requires "new business models, new roles, new skills, new organizational alignment and, most importantly, a new mindset," he says. More than 1,000 IT storage professionals and managers participated in the research.